It was one week into the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and only one day before its ceremonious end, when audiences at last enjoyed the arrival of the programme’s two hottest tickets. Both provoked lively debate when they premiered this May in Cannes — one in competition, the other a midnight show. Both were celebrated in some quarters as bold and accused elsewhere of pretension. And both were assured in the Czech Republic to once again divide the room.

Youth and Love: the former a stylish, urbane drama by Oscar-winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, the latter a vulgar and disreputable art-house porno by Argentine enfant terrible Gaspar Noe. The former received a standing ovation and the honour of the festival’s Audience Award. But it was the latter I preferred by far.

That I didn’t care for Youth was admittedly not so surprising. I remember being quite aghast last March when Sorrentino’s previous feature, The Great Beauty, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — a distinction of perhaps dubious merit that nevertheless rarely strikes me as so off the mark. Sorrentino is only forty-five, but he makes the sort of petulant, vaguely lecherous movies you’d expect of an octogenarian with a life and career already behind him. Hence The Great Beauty radiates unpleasantness: it is an ugly and mean-spirited film, sentimental about the woes of an aging man but hostile toward everyone and everything else, women in particular. The trouble is that the director’s sense of venomous satire is more self-righteous than self-aware. His complaints prove facile, targeting in broad strokes such musty targets as high society and modern art. I suspect this is mainly an intellectual problem. Sorrentino simply isn’t smart enough to lecture or chide.

As churlishness goes, Youth is somewhat improved: the customary cruel streak is tempered by the presence at the film’s centre of Michael Caine, an actor of such warmth he can melt even Sorrentino’s sub zero manner. Like The Great Beauty, Youth concerns itself with the private misery of two very old and disagreeable men — a retired composer being solicited by the Queen to return to work (Caine) and a filmmaker completing work on the script for what he hopes will be his final creative testament (Harvey Keitel). Luxuriating in the splendour of a celebrity health spa in the Swiss Alps, Caine and Keitel spend a great deal of time reflecting on life’s regrets or otherwise moping lavishly, which is of course Sorrentino’s favoured register.

They also find the time to mock — or more often watch dispassionately as the film tacitly mocks — everyone from middle-aged movie stars to emissaries from Buckingham Palace, the majority of whom are once again women. There’s Caine’s daughter (Rachel Weisz), on the story’s periphery, suffering the indignity of her husband having left her for a woman who is not only younger but, as he feels bizarrely compelled to explain, better in bed; the younger woman in question meanwhile is a pop star of stupefying vapidity. At one moment the film seems tantalizingly close to permitting Miss Universe (Madalina Ghenea) to emerge victorious in a debate and be proven something of a surprise intellectual. And then in her next scene she says nothing as Caine and Keitel (and the camera) ogle her nude. It’s as if Sorrentino is incapable of extending empathy to anyone not exactly like himself. So as usual he only has time or patience for his leads.

What endears so many to Sorrentino anyway, I think, is how readily his films fall into a kind of European tradition of quality — the old-fashioned cosmopolitan romance embodied by directors like Federico Fellini, to whom he is often, and irritatingly, compared. Sorrentino’s films, despite their malice, seem reputable and dignified, emblematic in some way of cultivation and good taste. (It’s an impression underlined by sumptuous photography and, in The Great Beauty especially, striking architecture and beautiful suits. His work is fashionable in more than one sense.)

Gaspar Noe embodies an opposing sensibility: his films seem indecent, crude, tasteless — and unabashedly so. He has always been a provocateur, and not always fruitfully: his films have a sensationalistic aspect that tends to suggest depth where depth may not be. He is very good at arousing conversation, in any case, whether by causing audience members to faint and vomit (as many reportedly did in early screenings of Irreversible, their illness induced by a low-frequency sound that hums beneath the film’s first act) or by mounting such extravagant spectacles as believable skull-crushing and “internal” sex scenes (that is, sex scenes shot from inside, of which the climax of Enter the Void is largely composed). This is, for better or worse, must-see cinema.

And so too is Love, the latest opus, nearly two and a half hours long and riddled with graphic, unsimulated sex. Karl Glusman plays a young American named Murphy — as in Murphy’s Law — opposite Aomi Muyock as Electra, his live-in French girlfriend in Paris. The film is a sweeping chronicle of their relationship’s rise and fall. The major talking points have already been discussed exhaustively: it’s in 3D; much of the sex is more or less pornographic, in the sense of how it’s shot and what we see; and, as these two points collide, sex and its aftermath are rendered quite literally in your face. The packed house in Karlovy Vary with whom I saw the film seemed eager for titillation, and indeed they usually laughed, in an amused, perhaps even mildly embarrassed way, whenever penetrated or related acts were mounted and lingered over on screen. But in fact the film doesn’t seem much interested in being provocative for its own sake in this way. For the most part the sex itself is fairly tame — more affectionate than aggressive, more sensual than debased. It’s actually rather sweet.

This is precisely what I admired about the film. Love really is, maybe surprisingly, about love, and it does a good job digging deep into what it means to give yourself over to another person. I can’t think of another relationship drama as smart about the ways that infatuation often manifests itself: as fury, as madness, as obsession. Noe understands, as few other filmmakers seem to that even great relationships bring out the worst in us just as often as they bring out the best. He understands, too, that the love of one’s life can seem insufferable and irresistible in equal measure. And what’s admirable is that he’s given himself over to the film with the same degree of unrestraint. Love is extravagant, sprawling, immoderate, sometimes silly or over-the-top — but at the risk of invoking a cliché the film is those things because love is too. I think I will always prefer the earnest reckless of a film like Love to the decorous self-satisfaction of Youth. Give me the vulgar and disreputable art-house porno. The movie has heart.